North Pacific Crossing, Week 4 Update

We’ve just wrapped up our fourth week on this crossing since leaving Ailuk, and we’re two weeks out from our unplanned stop at Midway Island. All is well onboard. We found ourselves quite gun-shy for the first week or so since resuming our journey, staring with saucer eyes at all clouds for signs of lightning, but thankfully there hasn’t been any. We continue to be graced with albatross sightings, though we’ve left the tropicbirds and fairy terns behind. Now we have acrobatic petrels doing laps around the boat, and the occasional shearwater loping over the waves.
Now that we’ve been scrutinizing it every day for the past month, we realize the summertime North Pacific High is not the stable monolithic beast we once thought it was. It was hopping around quite a bit, doing a do-see-do around us for several days. Other highs popped up nearby and merged with it. Some of the more intense Alaskan lows impinged upon it. Its antics drove us further and further north in our attempt to get on top of it, but we finally got onto its north side and have turned east, following a fast beeline track to Vancouver Island. We’ve also entered a world of fog and chill, and have been covering our tans, layer by layer, in fleece and foulies, transforming ourselves back into numb-fingered, runny nosed creatures of the Pacific Northwest.